China's Brave New World and Other Tales for Global Times

November 15, 2007

If Chairman Mao came back to life today, what would he think of Nanjing's bookstore, the Librairie Avant-Garde, where it is easier to find primers on Michel Foucault's philosophy than copies of the Little Red Book? What does it really mean to order a latte at Starbucks in Beijing? Is it possible that Aldous Huxley wrote a novel even more useful than Orwell's 1984 for making sense of post-Tiananmen China - or post-9/11 America?

Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom is Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine. His books include Student Protests in Twentieth-Century China: The View from Shanghai. He lives in Irvine, California. In these often playful, always enlightening "tales," Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom poses these and other questions as he journeys from 19th-century China into the future, and from Shanghai to Chicago, St. Louis, and Budapest. He argues that simplistic views of China and Americanization found in most soundbite-driven media reports serve us poorly as we try to understand China's place in the current world order - or our own.

(c) 2007 The University of Chicago. Recorded as a part of The World Beyond the Headlines series, a collaborative project of the Center for International Studies, the International House Global Voices Program, and the Seminary Co-op Bookstores. The series aims to bring scholars and journalists together to consider major international issues and how they are covered in the media.